Quality Education

ROME | PARIS (IDN) – Signalling a major achievement for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Arab world, Sharjah has been named World Book Capital 2019 by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The honour is recognition of the emirate's pioneering role in supporting and expanding the local and regional publishing industries, promoting reading to become an intrinsic cultural practice, as well as embracing intercultural, knowledge-based dialogue.

NEW YORK (IDN) - Jayathma Wickramanayake of Sri Lanka is the new UN Envoy on Youth. She succeeds Ahmad Alhendawi of Jordan. Announcing this appointment, Secretary-General António Guterres said he was grateful for Alhendawi's dedicated service in addressing the needs and rights of young people, bringing the work of the United Nations closer to them.

BONN (IDN) – Two United Nations agencies, the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat and the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) have launched a significant initiative aimed at preparing young developing country professionals to lead climate action. It will get under way following the UN Climate Change Conference, which runs to May 18.

The fellowship initiative will offer work experience in a vibrant international policy environment at the UNFCCC Secretariat, according to a media release.. The UNU-EHSwill help identify and recruit the young professionals, and provide them with an exciting research environment, the media release added.

NAIROBI (IDN) – The African Union (AU) in collaboration with the government of Germany has established an initiative to help young Africans acquire practical skills for meeting the needs of labour markets.

The aim is to strengthen their occupational prospects in view of the continent’s unemployment crisis.

Most hit are young people, with around 60 percent of the unemployed under the age of 25. Key players in implementation of the initiative are the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the German government’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation, as well as the German KfW Development Bank. NEPAD is a socio-economic development flagship programme of the AU.

BANGKOK (IDN) - The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) Global Summit, held for the first time in Southeast Asia, pivoted on how Asia-fuelled tourism would impact the industry worldwide. The discussions also centred around whether tourism could be an enabler of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) if it were heritage-focused offering community experiences – rather than “exotic” sites – so that significant leakages of tourism revenue could be tapped.

Financial leakages in tourism occur when revenues arising from tourism-related economic activities in destination countries are not available for re-investment or consumption of goods and services in the same countries. Financial resources 'leak away' from the destination country to another country, particularly when a tourism company is based abroad and when tourism-related goods and services are being imported to the destination country.

BHOLA, Bangladesh (IDN) – In Bangladesh, as in many other parts of the developing world, the barbaric practice of underage marriage is still widespread.

Now, in what Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called a "devastating step backward for the fight against child marriage", the Bangladesh government has approved a controversial provision allowing child marriages under “special circumstances”.

The ‘Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2017’, passed on February 27, defines any marriage involving one or both parties below the legal age (21 for boys and 18 for girls) as ‘child marriage’, and recognises that girls under the age of 18 can be married off with permission from their parents and a court in undefined special circumstances, without specifying a minimum age.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (IDN) – Investing in sport can help reduce spiralling health costs and promote education, social cohesion and gender equality, says a new guidebook published by The Commonwealth.

The recommendations of the guidebook, titled ‘Enhancing the Contribution of Sport to the Sustainable Development Goals’, are important to the Caribbean, where chronic and communicable diseases are devastating to individuals and community, threatening the quality of life and becoming an increasingly negative factor in the region’s development.

SIEM REAP/BATTAMBANG, Cambodia (IDN) - The once conflict ridden, impoverished country of Cambodia has made significant strides towards stability and progress, but it is still facing several socio-economic development challenges.

In 2016, it became a lower middle-income country after recording an annual average economic growth of seven percent over the past decade. “The country’s economy has trebled and the number of people living in poverty has halved in the last 15 years. We have to set development issues in the context of those successes,” says Nick Beresford, United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Cambodia Country Director.

NEW YORK (IDN) – The destruction of landmarks such as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Roman monuments in Palmyra, or shrines and mosques in Tikrit and Mosul are reprehensible attempts to erase history, says Yury Fedotov, the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

But the destruction and looting are also generating profits for terrorists through trafficking, carried out in collusion with organized crime groups. Those profits fund further acts of terrorism, and enable yet more destruction and looting of cultural sites and archaeological treasures, Fedotov told the United Nations Security Council.

Fackson Banda is Programme Specialist in the Bureau of UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC).

PARIS (IDN) - As social media expands, journalism is more special than ever: This is the conviction expressed by participants at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) colloquium, aptly titled ‘Journalism under fire: challenges of our times’.